The Dark Side of Zentropa’s Provocative Workplace Culture

Zentropa’s studio is housed in a former military camp outside Copenhagen and embodies militant transparency, with open doors and open-plan workspaces.

Photograph by Theodor Barth / laif / Redux

The image of Denmark that travels around the world is that of a
peaceful, progressive, liberal, educated country on the cutting edge of
feminism. And that’s certainly how I viewed my home country during the
years that I lived away from it. In the nineties, while pursuing a Ph.D.
in New York, I would often boast to my fellow-students about Denmark’s
admirable gender equality and its history of strong, independent women.
It was one of the first countries in the world to give women the vote
(1915), elect a woman minister (1924), legalize abortion (1973), and
institute equal pay (1976). America seemed to lag hopelessly behind.
Which is why, as my two daughters grew older, my British husband and I
decided to move back to Europe and raise our girls in Denmark.

The homecoming also gave me the chance to write about another aspect of
Denmark that made me proud: its famously edgy movie industry,
spearheaded by the film company Zentropa. Its founder, the auteur-director Lars von Trier, was famed for co-creating the Dogme 95
school, which produced such breakout films as “Festen” and von Trier’s own
“Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark.” When I first visited
Zentropa, I was captivated. The studio is housed in an isolated former
military camp outside Copenhagen and embodies militant transparency,
with open doors, open-plan workspaces, and tabloid headlines critical of
Zentropa defiantly on display.

There’s a playful, cheeky defiance, too, in the have-a-splash outdoor
swimming pool and the secondhand furniture: no fancy Danish design here,
just the homely hygge of lit candles. Peter Aalbæk Jensen, Zentropa’s
co-founder, was also a man of hygge. He’d crack jokes and make people
feel special; he was famous but didn’t put on airs; he invited
misfits—transsexuals, the young and psychologically damaged, and even
convicted pedophiles—into his generous orbit. When I saw the man who
calls himself Lillefar, or “Little Daddy,” he seemed at first
benevolent, even vulnerable, as he took a nap in the company’s main room
in the middle of the day, shoes off and feet up, glasses on the table,
hands folded across his chest.

But, the more I visited Zentropa, the more I saw behavior that made me
feel uncomfortable—both as a woman and as a Dane. The interview with von
Trier went well: the world-famous director was amicable and
down-to-earth. Aalbæk Jensen, on the other hand, refused to speak to me,
on the grounds that he was sick of talking to the press; it would be
more interesting, he suggested, to talk to Zentropa’s staff. Which is
how I came to approach an intelligent young woman—I’ll call her
Sarah—who had recently started work as a music consultant in Zentropa’s
legal department. Sarah agreed to meet me regularly for my research.

To begin with, she reported impressions similar to my own: that Zentropa
was an “eccentric” workplace, more like a “playground,” with no
hierarchies, and a sense of “we’re all just anti-authoritarian, creative
free-spirit anarchists.” But within weeks, suddenly and from nowhere,
Sarah’s friendly boss, Aalbæk Jensen, turned into a bully, and the fun,
lighthearted workspace became a daily torment. On a cold day in
January, 2011, von Trier wandered into the legal department and casually
proposed to Sarah that she should take off her clothes and get in the
pool with him. Skinny-dipping in the pool is a Zentropa ritual. When
you’ve stripped naked in front of Aalbæk Jensen and von Trier, you are
accepted into the circle of the initiated. They’ve all (supposedly) done
it. Some of Denmark’s leading film critics have done it, too, in Cannes,
in a competition initiated by Aalbæk Jensen to win an interview with
Nicole Kidman, who starred in von Trier’s “Dogville.” I have done it. I
don’t feel good about it now, but at the time I wanted something badly:
I wanted my story. But, that day in January, Sarah didn’t want to strip,
and she said so. Aalbæk Jensen stepped in. “Either you jump into the pool with me,” he told
her, “or I’ll have to fire you.”

When Sarah refused to comply, a familiar Aalbæk Jensen cry rang out
through the hallways of Zentropa: “Fire that bitch!” A “bitch”
(kælling) in Zentropa-lingo is a female employee who doesn’t follow
the bosses’ orders. Another term that Aalbæk Jensen often uses to describe
his female employees is “hooker” (or just “L,” for luder in Danish).
On an excursion to Zentropa’s country retreat in May, 2012, Aalbæk
Jensen referred to a female intern as “L”—until she jumped naked into
the sea with him and was given back part of her real name: “A,” for
Anna. Anna didn’t seem to find this in any way offensive, and the “Z”
tattooed on her arm would give her a free pass to Zentropa’s parties at
Cannes, as has been the practice for some of the interns in the company.

But back to Sarah. After Aalbæk Jensen fired her for not stripping for a
swim with him, Sarah’s co-workers—mostly lawyers—tried to calm her down,
explaining that it was just part of Zentropa’s shtick: she wasn’t
fired fired, just “fired.” The invitation to strip was a good thing:
it meant that she was being “tested” by Aalbæk Jensen to see whether she
would fit into the fabric of the Zentropa family. “Testing” is another
Zentropa rite of passage that Aalbæk Jensen has developed especially for
new Zentropa employees and interns, who are known as Småtter (nobodies). He will single out an intern—usually female—and isolate her
from the rest of the group by verbally attacking, teasing, and provoking
her.

Over the next couple of weeks, Aalbæk Jensen would torment Sarah
publicly (“Didn’t you get fired? How come you’re still here?”), while
backstage her co-workers would reassure her (“That’s just Peter—he’s
just testing you”), until, one day, Jensen offered her a shot at
redemption. If she could come up with “a creative solution to her
problem,” he would reinstate her.

Her answer, the following day, was to buy a cream sponge cake and throw
it in his face. But her “creative solution” to a problem not of her own
making didn’t go down well with the suddenly less playful Aalbæk Jensen.
The test was over—and she’d failed it. When her firing was confirmed, it
was Anders Kjærhauge, who is now the C.E.O. of the company, who did the
honors, on the grounds of “minor violence” (a fireable offense,
according to Danish criminal law). When Kjærhauge was interviewed in Variety in November, his response to the allegations of sexual harassment at
Zentropa made by nine women in the Danish broadsheet Politiken was
“These are personal experiences and I am sad that this is how they feel,
but this is not the Zentropa I know.”

Last month, Kjærhauge told The New Yorker in an e-mail that he
disagreed with the allegations. He said that it is “extremely rare that
people are skinny dipping in our pool,” and denied that Aalbæk Jensen
“called his female employees ‘hooker,’ ” adding that “almost 80 %
of our employees are strong, clever, and independent females, and they
would never accept such a situation.” (Requests for comment directly
from Aalbæk Jensen went unanswered.) Sarah, Kjærhauge said, “went away
as the winner, so I cannot see the victim angle.” He went on, “We are
sorry that some former female employees have considered certain episodes
as harassment, and it has resulted in some reflections about our humor,
ironic tone, and our spaciousness for odd behavior. . . . We will definitely
work on being better to detect if employees are unhappy about their
working environment.”

Back in 2013, when I told Sarah’s story and that of others in my book,
“Zentropia,” the revelations about sexualized intimidation were met with
silence. Neither von Trier, Aalbæk Jensen, nor Zentropa commented
publicly on what I’d reported. Even more surprisingly, no journalists
whom I know of asked them to. For two decades, the Danish media had
focussed on how von Trier’s indie powerhouse revolutionized Danish film
and made it a global brand. Nobody seemed interested in stories that
might undermine that image at home or abroad.

Those who dared to speak out, like some of the women I interviewed, became pariahs within Zentropa—and
the wider nation ignored them. Few raised their eyebrows when they
learned about the allegations that Aalbæk Jensen groped his
employees’ breasts and bottoms, or whipped out his penis to do the “the
propeller” (swinging his dick around in quick motion), or air-humped
young women, or spanked interns in front of their co-workers as
“punishment.” (He was an equal-opportunities punisher: male interns were
spanked by a gay male employee.) “Nothing new under the sun,” a critic
concluded in Jyllands-Posten. Only one journalist, Martin Krasnik,
took Aalbæk Jensen to
task on national TV on
the then-not-so-hot topic of sexual harassment in the workplace. Aalbæk
Jensen did not deny that he serially sexually harrassed young girls in
his company and publicly humiliated them at the firm’s Christmas party;
more, he proudly admitted to awarding ten thousand kroner (about fifteen
hundred dollars) to the first trainee to strip naked. The next day, I
couldn’t find a single newspaper that commented on Krasnik’s
revelations. Instead, the commentators focussed on how the great
performer Aalbæk Jensen had won the “duel” with Krasnik. (When The New
Yorker asked for comment about these specific allegations, again
Aalbæk Jensen did not respond personally.)

It was then that I realized that if Zentropa was a cult, then it was a
cult within a cult. And the outer cult was Denmark, whose bizarre
reaction floored me. A young woman yelled at me in the supermarket not
long after my book came out, “You’re not allowed to write about Peter
like that, and you know it!” A well-known Danish director accused me of
having become “politically correct.” It may seem strange to outsiders,
but in Denmark, a nation that champions freedom of expression,
“political correctness” is considered a form of self-censorship.

In Kjærhauge’s e-mail, he wrote, “If you go 20 years back, I am sure we all can recall stupid,
provoking, transboundary behavior. This also goes for Peter.” He
concluded, “Ten years ago, a lot laughed about it, five years ago a lot
laughed about it too, but now the exact same events are considered as
harassment.”

My experience since returning to Denmark is that if you raise a critical
voice about your country, your fellow-citizens will close ranks. Small
countries are very protective of their global image, and Denmark more so
than most. Its favorite “Denmark stories” are those that confirm its
widely shared utopian self-image: its famous rescue of more than ninety
per cent of Danish Jews from the Nazis; its sexual liberation (porn was
legalized in 1969); its legalization of same-sex partnerships, in 1989.
But there are other true stories, less appetizing to the wider world.
Denmark is the country that produced the Muhammad cartoons; the country
in which the anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic, nationalist People’s Party
ran second, with twenty-one per cent of the votes cast, in the last
election; the country that tops a
report about physical abuse against women in the E.U. The country in
which successful and internationally acclaimed men like Peter Aalbæk
Jensen and Lars von Trier are untouchable. (In mid-November, it was reported that Aalbæk Jensen had at last been “sidelined” and “will not partake in
any management meetings.”)

Given Zentropa’s
abuse-friendly culture and Denmark’s cherished reputation as a small
nation that punches above its weight, my Zentropa story was always going
to be a difficult one to break. Now that it has broken for the second
time, with the recent allegations of harassment, I hope things will be
different. There are many Denmarks. In a few years, I will be sending my
daughters out into the Danish hall of mirrors, to look for a job. May
they find their self-respect reflected back at them, clearly.